I haven’t prioritized updating this site for long time
(almost five years has passed since my last post).
Lately, my interest in blogging has returned, so here’s a little update about my blogging life.

This blog is now off S3.

Back in 2011 I migrated the blog to Jekyll and hosted it as a static site from Amazon S3.
Now it lives in a private repository on GitLab, hosted as a static site.
I’m pretty happy with my decision.
I have nothing against hosting a static site on Amazon S3, but it’s far from straightforward.
The repo lived in Dropbox, I switched computers a few times and lost track of the Amazon S3 upload details.
I had a lot of patience for ornate build/deploy processes back then,
before I worked in tools and became extra-sensitive to poor developer experiences.
Now, because deploying is as simple as typing git push,
I’m much more motivated to keep things up to date.

I started two niche WordPress blogs.

Despite my appreciation for Jekyll, I chose WordPress for these blogs due to their convenience and richer ecosystems.
They’re hosted on SiteGround, which I wholeheartedly recommend;
their customer service is superb and they have everything I need in a WordPress hosting platform.
Right now, they’re extremely low-profile blogs (it’s a big day if I get a single visitor on either) but in 2019 I’m going to try and increase their traffic.

The first of my blogs, The 1x Engineer, collects software development tips.
I started it because I found myself giving my peers at work a lot of the same tips about tools and process.
If a teammate is having a hard time diagnosing a regression in their code,
it’s much easier to point them to my article about git bisect
than to explain the concept from scratch each time.

In a less professionally-relevant vein, over the last year my interest in playing guitar has been renewed.
I started Var Guitar as a place to write about gear I like.
Long-term, I’d like attract enough traffic that I can serve affiliate links against the content and maybe make some money in the process.
I have no idea how realistic this goal is. Wish me luck!

One of Gmail’s hidden treasures is how easily it can be automated.
Its filtering system is widely known, but the real treat is script.google.com, which lets you script Gmail.
The scripts are written in a language called “Google Apps Script” (which is more or less JavaScript),
and there is a wide-ranging API that lets you control almost all of your Google services (Drive, Analytics, Calendar, etc).
These tasks can be run periodically, in response to triggers, or ad-hoc.

An example: automatically mark emails as read

If your inbox has thousands of unread emails that are unlikely ever to be read, and you are anxious about this,
you might benefit from automatically managing your unread email count.
I’ve created a script which, on weekdays, marks as read any unread email older than 24 hours.
This lets me skim the subject lines in my inbox, open the emails that seem interesting, and ignore the rest, which will quietly vanish a day later.

Combined with Priority Inbox,
this script helps me have a high ratio of “effectiveness at email” to “attention spent on email”,
which I lack if I have to read every single message in my inbox.
Despite how risky this approach seems, it hasn’t caused me to miss out on anything important.

Development

Scripting Gmail is very approachable. The API covers lots of functionality, and the documentation is comprehensive.
You don’t need an in-depth knowledge of JavaScript.
Google even provides a little web-based IDE in which to edit and debug your scripts.
My one complaint is that there is no mock environment for testing - you have to develop your scripts on a real inbox.
If this is a problem for you, you can use a dummy email account for development.

In conclusion

In the future, I’d be interested to try script.google.com to automate my use of other Google services.
For now, it’s proven extremely useful at managing my email, and I strongly recommend it.

A few years ago I dropped my Roland Micro Cube guitar amplifier and ripped the speaker cone. As a result, it would make terrible farty noises if played above a certain volume. Last week I replaced the speaker - here are the steps I followed.

Tools needed: a screwdriver, a phone, and a credit card. No soldering iron required.

Call Roland Customer Support and ask for a replacement Micro Cube speaker, model number W120FP70-00C. It costs about $30 with tax and shipping. Mine arrived after about two weeks.

When you have the new speaker, set the Micro Cube down with its grill facing up. Unscrew the grill, then unscrew the old speaker from the mount.

Gently remove the old speaker from the mount, so its connectors are visible.

Pull the connectors out of the old speaker - they’ll slide off with a little force, as shown in the above photo - and connect them to the new speaker. The connectors are different sizes, so don’t worry about connecting them incorrectly.

Mount the new speaker and reattach the front grill.

Plug in your guitar and rock out.

This is the most straightforward method I’ve seen to replace a Micro Cube’s speaker. If you want to try a non-Roland speaker, there are tutorials for that online too. Happy jamming!

I’ve used jQuery since I began my web development career,
but I sometimes feel like it makes life too easy.
In the spirit of rejecting complacency,
I wrote a simple JavaScript image slider without jQuery or other libraries.

You can find a demonstration of the image slider here,
and the Github repo is here.

It was illuminating to see how much I take jQuery for granted.
For example, I wanted to add a button to the page.
jQuery makes this very easy:

I looked at jQuery’s source code after I finished the exercise
to see how $.wrapAll was implemented,
and unsurprisingly their implementation is very elegant.
I think the average web developer can learn a lot from reading the
jQuery source;
for an excellent introduction, check out this screencast
by Paul Irish.

This proved to be a fun and educational task,
and it renewed my appreciation for jQuery’s simplicity and
effectiveness.
If you want to better understand the gifts jQuery gives you,
I strongly recommend you try a little project without it.